Post, Like, Lurk

How do you contribute to the experiment?

As of the 1st of this month, I no longer have a Twitter account. I was on Twitter for over 14 years. While I am not happy about that platform's evolution, I am optimistic about the new social media platforms that are rising from its ashes. Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky are all making promising moves.

This got me thinking about social media in general. While I have a love-hate relationship with social, I have always been fascinated by the concepts: posting, liking, and lurking.

Which are you?

My first true social media platform was MySpace, though I really hearken back to AIM. From the conception of social to the form it is now, there have been active and passive users of it. Going back to AIM, you could join a chat room and engage or you could just read the conversations. What is posting, liking, and lurking—and why does it matter?

Posting & Liking

When you post to social or like something, you inform the algorithm who you are, you ask for validation for what you posted, and get bits of dopamine. While we all know this feedback is not the healthiest form of dopamine, we continue to use social—as it is the easiest way to get ourselves seen or converse en masse.

Lurking

If you are the person that rarely, if ever, posts or engages with others and you use social to look up exes and coworkers, you are a lurker. Most people don't know this term as it relates to social, but the social media companies track this type of user.

Social media companies track lurkers' behavior just as much as the posters and likers. Their inaction is as important as the actions of others.

Why these titles matter

While the construct of social media is detrimental to us as humans, we know it's not going anywhere. What is interesting is that these categorizations of people actually cascade to the physical world. Posters tend to be more extroverted, likers are more ambiverted, and lurkers tend to be more introverted.

Social media is just as much a platform for community as it is a social experiment. This experiment is arming people to do what they want by simply catering to these archetypes and the sub-archetypes within them.

While I am not telling anyone to act differently on social than they would in real life, I am asking you to think about how you want to contribute to this experiment. Do you want your action or inaction to impact our future, even if it seems small? Does staying on a social platform impact the world for the better or at the very least impact it less harmfully than it could? If you are on a social platform that is seemingly innocuous, are you contributing to it in a truly positive way?

I ask myself these questions all the time. I enjoy putting my thoughts and creations out into the world. While I stayed on Twitter for too long, mainly out of comfort and nostalgia, I am glad to be gone. I am looking forward to the new social platforms, but I will not stick around if they fall short. There is weight in action and in inaction, how will you contribute to the experiment?